Rank and Status in Polynesia and Melanesia
Essays in honor of professor Douglas Oliver Douglas L. Oliver Publications de la SdO … Excerpt (Source: http://books.openedition.org) One of the less fortunate legacies that we who practice ethnography in Oceania have given the scholarly world is the stereotype of the Melanesian leader as “Big Man”. The designation “Big Man”, derived literally from the metaphor commonly used […]
The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond – review
Should we look to traditional societies to help us tweak our lives? Wade Davis takes issue with the whole idea Source: https://www.theguardian.com/ Anthropology was born of an evolutionary model by which 19th-century men such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, envisioned societies as stages in a linear […]